After 3 Years, Crack Plague In New York Only Gets Worse

By MICHEL MARRIOTT

Published: February 20, 1989

Looking back over the last three years, in which crack use in New York City has grown to epidemic proportions, Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer found a metaphor. He said it was like a balloon filled with water: ''When it's squeezed on one end, it expands in another.''

Despite the more than $500 million spent by the city in the last fiscal year on drug-related enforcement alone - more than twice the amount in fiscal 1986 -the presence of crack is more pervasive, more violent and more insidious in its effect on New Yorkers, particularly the poor.

These things have happened in the last three years:

* Crack has contributed to the city's soaring homicide rate. From 1987 to 1988, the number of murders in New York rose 10.4 percent. Drugs, the police say, in particular crack, played a role in at least 38 percent of the 1,867 murders last year, compared with a generally constant rate of 20 percent for years.

* Crack more than tripled the number of cocaine users in the city since 1986. According to New York State statistics, there were 182,000 regular cocaine users in New York City in 1986. That number grew, according to city officials, to an estimated total of 600,000 in 1988, most addicted to the cocaine derivative. City officials did not say what the frequency of use was among the 600,000 regular cocaine users.

* Crack contributed to a tripling of cases in which parents under the influence of drugs abused or neglected their children. In 1986, 2,627 such cases were reported, according to the City Human Resources Administration. In 1988 the number rose to 8,521. Much of the increase was because of crack, said Human Resources Administrator William J. Grinker. Consequently 73 percent of the deaths in abuse and neglect cases in 1987 resulted from parents abusing drugs, up from 11 percent in 1985, according to the statistics.

* Crack accounted for much of the surge in prisoners entering the city's correction system. In 1985 the city jail population was almost 10,000. Much as a result of crack use and related crimes, the current jail population is almost 18,000, correction officials say. Business Is Still Brisk

Police statistics indicate that despite an increase in arrests, crack business remains brisk. From July to December 1987, there were 13,601 felony and misdemeanor crack arrests in New York. In the most recent period for which statistics are available - between January and October 1988 - there were 31,223 arrests.

''When the crack issue is examined in its entirely, there is no question that the past three years of crack trafficking and abuse have had a more deleterious effect on the quality of life in New York than any other drug episode in history,'' concludes a recent study by the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

Among New York's poor - as in depressed areas of Washington, Miami and Los Angeles - crack has become the drug of choice. It is relatively cheap - usually about $10 a vial - relatively easy to produce, ingested by smoking and almost instantly addictive, the police and drug treatment experts say.

It is also a drug of desperation, linked to the urban poor's struggle to be part of the greater society, says Joyce Hartwell, founder and executive director of New York's Recovery Hot Line and Addiction Anonymous Education Project.

''They really want to deal and be part of society, and so crack is taken to be part of something,'' she said, adding that tragicially the drug renders its users capable of little else but consuming more of the drug.

Crack dealers are lured into the trade by quick economic gains in the city's most grim black and Hispanic areas. Ramifications Are Citywide

Meanwhile the ramifications of crack are being felt citywide. Almost daily new crack-inspired horror stories jolt the city's collective psyche, rendering New York City - real or imagined - less livable, more menacing.

''All across the face of this city, people are talking about this drug, whether they are victims or have children who are using it and are losing their lives or productivity,'' said Richard J. Koehler, the city's Commissioner of Correction. ''I don't care if people are upper-class, middle-class or living in poverty, in human terms crack is, at every level, affecting the city.''

Commissioner Koehler said a clear indication that crack was growing worse was in the rapidly rising prisoner statistics. He said that most of the crimes that put people in city jails were crack-related and that many incoming inmates admitted crack use on the outside.

In 1985 when crack first became a threat in New York, the city's jail population was 9,815. The next year it rose to 11,173. In 1987 it reached 12,979, and the next year it was 15,000. Early this month the city jails had more than 17,500 inmates, according to correction officials. Jail Emergency Declared

Last September correction officials were forced to declare a ''jail emergency'' because of overcrowding.

''The only thing that is different is the prevalence of crack,'' said Ruby Ryles, a spokeswoman for the City Correction Department.